#halflearnedlibrarian

Yes! I kinda sorta get the feeling that people who complain about the Canadian system aren’t quite aware of just how much worse it is in the USA. As people said in the notes of the post: Imagine that every time a doctor called you delusional, they charged you a minimum of $100 for the privilege.

Canadian healthcare can suck! See also: Kate Beaton’s account of her sister’s death from cancer, where medical professionals wrote in her chart that she was “paranoid” for suspecting her cancer might be back (spoiler: IT WAS). 

My current family doctor saw my mother for 5 years before I was born, and I’ve seen her all my life, and she’s great, but... idk, I feel like I could find someone who’s a lot better about mental health and chronic pain. With both of those issues, she spent years telling me to just exercise more and live right, and I had to self-educate about my conditions and learn how to use the system and basically strongarm her into referring me to specialists.

It really is kind of a relief when I go in for visits and she’s on holiday and she has some fresh-faced locum younger than I am, and they just know SO MUCH MORE about my conditions than she does, and they’re also fresh and new and don’t know me and want to do Everything Right. Oh, and some of them even know what bisexuality and polyamory are! 

It’s not that an older doctor can’t be super up-to-date with science changing at the speed of light when it comes to things like mental health, it’s just... a lot more likely with someone trained in this century, I guess. Not to mention, the doctors in this city who are well-equipped to handle the chronic pain-complex trauma-ADHD trifecta are FULL UP on patients. Sometimes literally, “He’ll take new patients unless they have one of those three conditions.”

Ugh, I guess that leaves me phoning around to every family physician in the city who’s got lots of training and experience with psychiatric issues. WHEE.

I decided to do hour of code in the choices listed in learning through games. I ended up coding a dance party between bears and cats while they did the floss? I think that this sort of game is really quite good as code can be fairly daunting when you first get into it. The bright colours and simple graphics mean that understanding how code is set up is made much easier and thus made me want to do more rather than running away screaming like my hair was on fire. 

I think the most common inforgraphics that many people run into are the inforgraphics that are the basic instructions on how to build/cook/make things. I was at Ikea the other day and thinking about it, I can’t think of a single time where I had to actually read the instructions on something, I just expect everything to be presented in some sort of inforgraphic. Is it because we are a visual species? Do we process things better in images? I am so used to seeing the info in picture format everywhere that it took me a second to realize that the instructions on the side of the pancake box do in fact count as an infographic and can be counted in this case.

This is one of my favorite documentaries(besides planet earth), though I think I’m probably a bit biased. 

https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts

One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is “Stuff you missed in history class”. Often times it covers subjects that you think you know what happened but then it moves on into details that you either have never heard of, or was perhaps covered up at the time. One example of this was the use of dazzle ships during the two world wars:

(Black-and-white image depicts a war ship painted in bold black and white stripes.)

This design was a large part of navy battle and yet, I had never heard about them. There are also episodes dedicated to important figures of history that may be overlooked due to gender, sexuality, or race. For example, there is a lot of emphasis on female scientists who may have been forgotten in the mainstream, or other women who should be known, like the founder of the girl scouts, Juliette Gordon Low.

I like podcasts because there appears to be a very low barrier to entry in making them. Although this could lead to issues such as issues with truth telling, at the same time, there can be delightful hidden gems such as Stuff you missed in history class, or I know Dino, which talks about a specific species and its history for each episode. 

(Image is a gif from Fantasia of the trex roaring as lightening flashes behind it).

Finally, I think that podcasts are good because they range from needing little or almost no brainpower, to as in-depth, and detailed as you want. 

This is the poster I created for Thing 11. 

Original Image from here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25949441@N02/6114769105/in/photolist-ajkMPx-ck3WE9-889AW4-cx3xu-aVLeBT-6mfhD7-jNStqr-2bBB2ot-aC5YGk-Z1xPV7-82aXjV-Uw4BM4-nuE6ZW-TigFVE-9ihr7H-67DKTD-Gr6GNW-4DZ81g-fw892-oaDi3p-amAcY8-ehUcoB-282y8ry-ea54EU-bPEDGv-26vGUuc-kXijMs-fgMgWN-7Efyw-qmDtD-s5wqPh-4q2oe7-Usr4NL-WigyM2-6kKt5M-qpahEj-7MiMsg-aVLeQD-3ZAfDL-8DGprf-cAQdBo-fduhqw-4YatoM-e3Vz19-CoY2A-e8UUT2-bGrjA-bQgeVc-GVHpaz-2aH4xaE/

(A picture of Microsoft office’s Clippy offering help.)

Having already been fairly sensitive to language, I decided that I should try something I hadn’t done before, and decided to use one of the accessibility extensions offered by chrome. I ended up downloading Read&Write. I then used it to write and edit a bunch of emails in order to test its effectiveness. 

(A animation of a car driving up to a spinning graphic that says email in changing colours)

I have to say, it was really useful. I loved having the ability to have the emails read to me, because sometimes the wall of text just seems to be too much. The downside, it seems, is that it only works on certain websites, though this maybe my unfamiliarity with the extension. Worked fantastically for gmail, and all the google products, but I couldn’t get it to work for outlook. Maybe it’s a compatibility issue with the two products. I suppose that is one of the downsides to having it and trying to use it for anything other than google. But I did like the highlight options. Plus it seemed to be fairly intuitive to use, which I really like. 

One of the other issues I could foresee was the price. It seems to cost for all the features after the free trial, which seems like something maybe that should be offered by the university/school. I wonder if that would be helpful to be incorporated into the general population. I think if accessibility items(that are able to be used by everyone and are not limited in the scope) are more incorporated, the more normal it would be, which I think is useful. If you build it to be accessible in the first place, its easier to maintain it than to try and go back and awkwardly change something.